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An anonymous reader writes "An e-sports production company has published the results of a survey into the demographics of the gamers who attend competition events. Even though nearly half of the gaming population is composed of women, they account for less than 10% of the players in competitions. The e-sports company, WellPlayed, said, '[A] whopping 90-94% of the viewers were male, and interestingly enough, only about half of the remaining survey takers felt comfortable being identified as female.' The results were taken from survey responses over the past year at competitions for StarCraft 2 and League of Legends. DailyDot makes the point that competitive gaming communities also tend not to be racially diverse. Quoting: 'Although no studies have been done about race in esports, it only takes one trip to a Major League Gaming event to confirm what Cannon says. With the notably racially diverse exception of the fighting-game community, Asians and white Americans make up an enormous portion of esports players and fans. Black and Middle Eastern esports fans are conspicuously missing.'"

Wonderful. Another story based on the assumption that absolutely everyone should be absolutely equally interested in absolutely everything.

*Shock* *amazement* they're not. Unless the venue is telling women, black people, and Middle Eastern people they're not allowed in the door, there is no story here.

Oh and if women are uncomfortable identifying themselves as female, maybe it's because stories like this keep making it into a Great Big Deal. Maybe they just want to be a person and not *OMFG A WOMAN IS HERE!* all the time.

Or maybe it's because that 90% majority of males is largely toxic, vulgar, immature, misogynist, and unwelcoming, and say shit like "OMFG A WOMAN IS HERE!" and tell women what they should do or say or feel about the men who act that way.

Or maybe it's because that 90% majority of males is largely toxic, vulgar, immature, misogynist, and unwelcoming, and say shit like "OMFG A WOMAN IS HERE!" and tell women what they should do or say or feel about the men who act that way.

<sarcasm>Yes 90% of males are all that way, just like 90% of black people want to steal your car.</sarcasm> Yes that is how you sound.

You just announced that you are perfectly fine with bigotry as long as you like the choice of target. Guess what? Every bigot operates that way.

Congratulations, you are part of the problem. If you ever learn to stop hating men you don't know who haven't done anything against you, you can be part of the solution. Then together we can speak out against the few troublemakers who think exactly the way you do now, except their target of bigotry happened to be women.

Being so new, I don't know that it's been studied specifically. From experience with similar groups, I suspect that the parent is correct. You'll also find plenty of research on male athletic subculture which supports his assertion.

Or you could just continue to stick your head in the sand and ignore reality because it conflicts with your groundless anti-feminist beliefs. That's a popular pastime here.

Ah this comment and its moderation makes me think the "sexism does not exist" brigade is out in full force.

The story has nothing to do with why, or assumptions or anything else. It merely reports the results. Now please stop getting your knickers in a twist about some supposed butthurt over some imaginary feminism or whatever it is you believe has happened.

It's kind of funny because you clearly don't like the results in some way because you're complaining abou

I don't think anybody in any significant numbers believe that sexism doesn't exist. The main thing is that people such as myself don't believe it is a travesty that women are interested in different things than men are. For example, you have fewer women in IT than men mainly because they simply aren't interested. There isn't some conspiracy holding them back (perhaps in the middle east or some place, but they're already backwards,) nor is there industry pressure to keep them out. Quite the opposite in fact,

Maybe they just want to be a person and not *OMFG A WOMAN IS HERE!* all the time.

Correct. The problem is that if they go to a gaming tournament that is the reaction they often get. In games themselves both genders are portrayed unrealistically, but women in particular tend to have ridiculously minimal costumes and improbably large boobs. At least the prototypical male lead is a somewhat attainable state if you can be bothered to work out every day.

Well, according to the "equality of outcome" school of thinking that dominates progressive thinking and policies, this amounts to racism. Therefore, the government must intervene in order to restore the preferred state, namely a statistically representative distribution of all genders and races.

Well, according to the "equality of outcome" school of thinking that dominates progressive thinking and policies, this amounts to racism. Therefore, the government must intervene in order to restore the preferred state, namely a statistically representative distribution of all genders and races.

The only way government could do that is to use force or threat of force to either: Force members of $MinorityGroup to attend events they don't want to attend, or Force $WhiteMales to stay away from events they want to attend. Both options would, in and of themselves, be institutionalized racism.

Institutionalized racism in the name of fighting racism is one of the worst kinds because its supporters can convince themselves they're doing a good thing. It's sort of like all the wars and killings and tort

Seriously, the entire "if there isn't enough of x" BS pisses me off to no end. It's screwed up everything it's touched, and then some. It literally allows people who wouldn't be qualified to work in areas they shouldn't, and it creates no shortage of animosity among people and for a very good reason. My personal favorite was back in the '00's where police services in Ontario were posting ads with "*insert minority* but, applications from whites were not being accepted" happens in government, happens in b

It isn't about getting a 50/50 balance of male/female competitors. It is about women who say they want to compete but are put off by the attitude of other competitors towards them due to their gender.

Same with jobs, when people say we want more women in tech jobs what they mean is that women want to go into those jobs but are put off, and we should do something to remove those gender based barriers. Not hand them a job or a qualification, remove the specific gender related problems.

Men and women are not equal in everything, regardless of what people may want to belief. There are differences in physical and mental capabilities, career inclinations and aspirations and a lot of other physical and psychological traits. Trying to conform men to women behavior and women to men behavior is a violence our political society tries to do to people, is ironically comparable to what it did in the past trying to make homosexual people straight.

In this day and age, where laws do not only grant equality of rights, but try to enforce equality of results, whenever there is a gender gap it is because it is part of what makes us different and the freer we get to choose the greater the gender gap will become. In a general manner, social gaps that can be closed by force are social gaps that should not be closed.

Any unnatural bias solves itself eventually and naturally as long as the law is neutral. Medics and Lawyers were all men in the past. Today half are women. If Engineers and Pro-Gamers are mostly males maybe it is because women (as a group) do not want to do these tasks or are not very good at it, especially when they have even additional legal incentives and advantages in doing so compared to men.

Individual women and individual men are another history though. There is enough variance in human genome to p

I notice it tends to be a push towards more women in traditionally male dominated areas but not the other way around.

For example, a huge majority of sign language interpreters are female. If you take a sign language class you see the same thing, lots of women, few guys. For such a politically active workforce you have to wonder, where is the outrage?

Why is male disinterest unquestioned? Why not start with the assumption that men are being prevented from joining female dominated groups and work to change tha

That doesn't seem to be the case. StarCraft II was $50 at launch but quickly adopted free to play multiplayer options. League of Legends was free from the start. A lot of pro e-sports players come from lower to middle class incomes that rent time on computers at the local internet cafe. In Korea and more recently North America and Europe, teams provide shared housing complete with food and a house maid so there inncentive to get good at these games.

If you need a specific example, Huk [wikipedia.org] had a pretty awful chil

I think the survey was 1. Male 2. Female 3. Do not want to disclose. 90-94% said they were male, and of the remaining 6-10%, half said they were female. The other half preferred not to say. But that does mean between 3-5% actually did identify as female.

I think the survey was 1. Male 2. Female 3. Do not want to disclose. 90-94% said they were male, and of the remaining 6-10%, half said they were female. The other half preferred not to say. But that does mean between 3-5% actually did identify as female.

If that is so, then it is incorrect to infer the sex of those who preferred not to disclose it.

My first instinct was to think that the competitive nature of e-sports would be more likely to attract men than women, as men are "naturally" more competitive when playing games, while women (in my experience) tend to play games either to socialize or relax. It is a very broad brush to paint the two sexes with, but as we are basically looking at a sub-section of men (those who are interested in playing or watching e-sports) versus an entire gender (women, specifically why are there not more of them playing/watching e-sports) any comparisons are going to be a bit disingenuous.However, I suspect that a large percentage of people who chose not to declare their gender in the survey are doing so out of a sense of privacy, rather than a desire to hide the "fact" that they are women... unless they are also attending the venue where the survey is taken while wearing androgynous clothing designed to mask their gender, and expect to be pounced on like an antelope surrounded by a pack of hungry lions if there is even a hint of femininity (disturbingly, that is probably not far from the truth in some cases).

Actually, I think that may be part of it. There are individually competitive women, of course, but I think most women who have that kind of drive are already doing real sports. I personally find a lot more enjoyment in team-based video games and activities than in solo play, which is why "E-Sports" seems like a weird hobby to me despite the fact that I play games several hours a day.

Now, back to the topic at hand... I think that some of the high-profile games tend to have a plot/story and/or serveral characters that may not appeal to women. Thus, they do not try video games. Those that do then have to go through Internet (it isn't pretty, and it isn't just related to video games) on their way to tournaments/professional playing (because even if they don't really go online, people will find their info and bring it outside the Internet).

The problem with saying "half of gamers are female" is in how you identify someone as a "gamer." If you identify someone who plays phone games but doesn't own a console and hasn't purchased a AAA game since they left high school as a "gamer," you're not going to be pulling from the same pool as people who would be interested in actually playing StarCraft II or League of Legends competitively. For the purposes of identifying the gender game in e-sports, those casual gamers are not "gamers." And if that means that the pool of available players shifts to something like 75% male (I have no idea if this is true or not, this is entirely a hypothetical), then the gender gap does not appear *as* bad (but obviously would still exist). And if that means the pool shifts to 90% male, then the gender game as it applies to e-sports basically does not exist, because the gender gap in e-sports would be a result of the gender game in competitive games in general, and not an e-sports specific problem.

I agree with your idea that we're looking at the wrong populations, and actually would suggest that "e-sport" people aren't "gamers" but rather "people who play obsessively".

Look at the population of people who play a single game obsessively, then look at the population of people who play said game at the competitive level, and I'm sure any demographic gaps would disappear almost completely.

I am one of those annoying socially progressive types that calls people and business out when I see them assigning genders roles to kids. The difference in male and female toy isles is a big pet peeve of mine. But that's not what I am here to comment on, I just want people to know where I am coming from regarding the following statements:

So we know that roughly half of all gamers are women yet nearly none attend these events. First, I would like to see a breakdown of game genre's between men and women. The

That's because testosterone makes us competitive and aggressive where as most women find a lot of games pointless. That is THE reason, this isn't a problem, this isn't sexism, and this isn't an article worth reading. The end.

I think it's more related to art/plot/story direction than gameplay itself, although I'll admit that you are right in stating that men tend more towards violence (from young males tend to be encouraged to do that. Just notice how people give toy guns and action figures that everything around them is violence [yes, superheros ARE about violence. How many superheros do you see solving problems through argumentation, for example?]). And yes, we probably need more females in the video game industry (not just co

The porn industry has some amazingly sexist statistics. It's a very sexist industry. Something needs to be done about that!! We have to encourage more women to enjoy watching porn and more men to engage in producing it. Yeah... equality in all business and recreation. That's the ticket!

The numbers pretty much match up. This is simply a gender based preference. Argument that "women play more but are discriminated against in competitive scene" which is what these claims usually push appears to be patently false - the issue is that women are simply not interested in comeptitive gaming, preferring cooperative gaming instead.

1. "It Is The Tools (Stupid)." And by that I mean "the tools" I mean the software used to watch and participate. None of this is exactly "user friendly" or easily discoverable. I don't play "League of Legends" but I do play "Dota 2" a lot and you have to actively follow reddit.com/r/Dota2 and know where to look for the information on the software let alone matches. It is difficult if not impossible to even use social "share" mechanism. And even using the hooks offered from Twitch.tv into FB/G+/Twitter just

1. "It Is The Tools (Stupid)." And by that I mean "the tools" I mean the software used to watch and participate. None of this is exactly "user friendly" or easily discoverable. I don't play "League of Legends" but I do play "Dota 2" a lot and you have to actively follow reddit.com/r/Dota2 and know where to look for the information on the software let alone matches. It is difficult if not impossible to even use social "share" mechanism. And even using the hooks offered from Twitch.tv into FB/G+/Twitter just means your "regular" page becomes a spammy mess.

hard to find games to watch in dota2? maybe you never clicked the watch button right there on the title screen.

Lets say you are a new guy (or girl) who has only heard of "Dota 2" from the guys at work who won't stop talking about it so you want to watch a few games to see for yourself. You need to install the client which isn't that hard (as difficult as anything else on Steam) but it is not stupidly trivial either. You can try the default settings but that is a "your mileage may vary" situation where one might have to tweak the graphical settings to get a smooth running display. No

Actaually, as a father myself, I'd find protecting my family to be pretty darn motivating. In fact, if you look at the story lines for a number of games, they involve protecting children, even if the actual gameplay is somewhat divorced from that.

That we like something that other white dudes and asian dudes are into? Fuck no. It's fine. Not everyone has to like every thing. If only white guys like it, that doesn't mean that something must be WRONG with it, or white guys, or that the whole institution is sexist and/or racist.

The NBA isn't very racially diverse, and has 0 sexual diversity. Who gives a fuck?

How does this compare with other competitive activities? Without a reference point there is no basis for any assumption.

My (totally non-scientific) guess is that this is just a consequence of how the genders are raised. Boys are usually encouraged to take sports and play with cars while woman are encouraged to play with dolls and play instruments. This favors boys to have a more obsessive drive to master a subject, be it sports, science, or competitive videogames.

I've never really understood the point of sporting video games. If you're playing a game, why wouldn't you fly a spaceship or kill aliens or build a railway or raid tombs or do something that you couldn't otherwise do in real life?

Why play a soccer video game when you can just go outside and play soccer?

(Exceptions, of course, for those people with physical disabilities. If you like soccer and don't have use of your legs I suppose it makes sense, but I also assume this is a small minority of players.)

I've never really understood the point of sporting video games. If you're playing a game, why wouldn't you fly a spaceship or kill aliens or build a railway or raid tombs or do something that you couldn't otherwise do in real life?
Why play a soccer video game when you can just go outside and play soccer?
(Exceptions, of course, for those people with physical disabilities. If you like soccer and don't have use of your legs I suppose it makes sense, but I also assume this is a small minority of players.)

I like women. Heck, my wife an daughter are women. It's unusual that it is almost necessary to define that these days. But when I see women linebackers on an NFL winning team I'll know us guys are doomed.;-)

Also, I think you should research more into darts, snooker, etc. In more sports like this Women are allowed to complete in male tournaments (the male leagues are actually unisex), they just are not able to actually win or qualify. Hand-eye coordination is a physical ability, and tends to have huge gender based differences. The real professional athletes know this, as they actually follow the sport. We have decades of hard data on this, and do you think professional women athlete never interact with their male peers? The only people who think that women and men should compete in the same leagues are people who do not even watch the sports they are suggesting be changed.

There is not a single sport that I know of that women and men actually compete at the same level at. They are different in every single way (their brains are wired more differentially than their physical bodies are), so they do better or worse based on these differences in every sport out there.

You very well might be, I do not follow darts.But from what I understand from Wikipedia there is nothing stopping them from enrolling in mens tournaments. And I find it hard to believe that their never existed a woman darter who wanted to be the universal world champion."although no restrictions on women competing against men [exist]."

And for example, I did find this excerpt for some dart world records, separated by gender (http://www.sentex.net/~pmartin/patdarts/guinness.htm).Which shows gender having a hu

Women don't score as well as men in darts. In the BDO darts finals [wikipedia.org], only once in the last 20 years have either of the male finalists averaged less than the best ever women's average in a final, and that was last year. Only once has a male finalist averaged less than 80, and that was Leighton Rees losing in a whitewash back in 1979 - Anastasia Dobromyslova won the woman's final in 2009 with an average of 73.95. Men regularly average over 90 in the finals, which has never been achieved by a woman.

Actually, I was wrong. There are actually leagues in America which only allow Asians to join, and there was an attempt at a white one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-American_Basketball_Alliance_(2010)).

And I would not worry too much legally. There are thousands of women/black clubs. It is not like I could try to go to enter a Domestic Violence center, be denied, and sue them out of existence; And similarly for some group that specifically caters to blacks. You are right, you could never create a white on

I think that's a generalization that's dangerous, particularly when this is done based on percentage of a self-selecting subset of a population. I know very few grown men who play CoD or that ilk, and actively hate those games and the people who play them (and generalize as such!). I think there's even a brogaming hate website out there or two. Similarly Angry Birds didn't get popular from women alone, it's a pretty popular game. So what's the breakdown?

I suspect that if a female were out there that could really play well in e-sports, her gender would not only not be a disadvantage, but a serious advantage as far as attracting sponsors and attention. Look at Danica Patrick. Do you think she would be making as much in sponsorship deals if she were a guy with the same record? Shit, she was getting huge endorsement deals before she had even won a single race. A women who can compete head-to-head with guys in just about *any* sport is going to be CELEBRATED, n

It's most definitely a sport, far more so than chess for example. In SC2, you actually need to be in top physical shape in terms of both your hand dexterity (these people need push out a steady stream of over 300 actions per minute for entire game, try doing that with untrained hands, your muscles will be cramping up in less than a minute) as well as mentally.

"E-sport" is an attempt to apply the macho-associated word "sport" (usually understood to be a physical activity) to gaming. Competitive video gaming (even for an audience) is really no different from competitive chess or poker. You sit down and you match your ability to play a game against other people playing the same game. Something one can reasonably be proud of being good at, so the pretending-it's-something-else aspect is a bit childish.

There are no e-sport athletes any more than there are chess athletes or darts athletes or snooker athletes. E-sports are not athletic sports.

That's not to detract from the skill required to be a pro-level Starcraft II player. Nor do I disagree that they may be called "e-sports". However, calling practicioners of a sport which involves no strenuous physical activity an "athlete" just doesn't make sense (unless they also play an athletic sport).

Hunting is considered a sport, but you normally can't lose (I haven't seen a deer with a rifle yet). Even hunting game that can hunt back, the game plays with a pretty heavy handicap. Generally you either win, or you drink beer in the woods for a few hours and go home, which maybe is also a win.

Fishing is considered a sport, very similar to hunting. The odds are stacked heavily in your favor.

Hang-gliding and skydiving are considered sports, but there's no competition whatever. I suppose winning is defined a

Regardless, the dictionary definition of "sport" does include eSports, as well as Hunting, Fishing, Bowling and even Golf. eSports, to me, seems to fit a second meaning of sport, i.e. "mockery", better than any of the other definitions, but that's the eye of the beholder part.

Of course most sports playing in a "sporting" way, tend to have totally lost the original definition of the word "sport", that is to cause mirth and enjoyment. Very few competitive sports do that, most of the time. I find the people wh

Played at high level, sports don't really increase fitness beyond a point, they increase your ability to play in your role. Football players shorten their lives in many ways, and no, not all of them are related to head banging injuries. Is that fitness? For a quarterback, likely. But plenty of the team is about fulfilling a role. Sumo wrestlers don't live long either- sustaining that much muscle (and of course the famous fat) is hard for any body.

E-sports simply is more competitive, and shows of far more impressive, super-human, skill than its RL analogue.

By what judgement do you claim it's far more impressive? I've played plenty of videogames and plenty of sports. The top professionals in all of them seem very, very far away. I've actually raced alongside a professional XC racer: the usual staged start, but he got a puncture almost straight out of the gate and so was passed by the entire field, myself included. Seeing him in action in conditions I

Purely subjective.I have never been impressive by any RL sport. The results we see seem completely plausible for someone who has dedicated their lives to it. In fact, they have always disappointed me. I do not understand how someone would dedicate their life to being the best archer, dart-er, bowler (etc.) and ever make a less than absolutely perfect shoot/performance. I myself, having bowled 3 times in my life have gotten a large number of strikes. In my opinion, any professional bowler that ever bowls a l

The results we see seem completely plausible for someone who has dedicated their lives to it.

I have a feeling that you don't do much by the way of RL sports.

It might look "plausible" to an armchair expert, but unless you've tried it then it's impossible to know quite how hard it is. You will never come close to doing a 2 hour marathon, no matter how hard you try, because you almost certainly don't have the physiology for it.

I have never been impressive by any RL sport. The results we see seem completely plausible for someone who has dedicated their lives to it.

When someone like Ronnie O'Sullivan scores a 147 point snooker break in under five and a half minutes in competition that does not seem completely plausible to anybody on the planet, except Ronnie.

Even under practice conditions, that's implausible. World champions watched with awe and wonder. There's only one person that's ever lived that could even consider matching that right now, and that's Ronnie himself.

The problem with this is that it would make professional bowling (and so many other sports) obsolete. After you got to a certain level, their would be no reason to complete as you have reached the plateau of perfection where everyone is equally perfect at the game. I think it is likely that this huge incentive to not be perfect subconsciously prevents people from getting this good.

Nope, it's because it's just not as easy as you seem to think it is. You underestimate the amount of

People are capable of perfection. Someone who dedicates their life to something should be incredibly good at something.As another example, I have no idea how professional basketball players can ever miss a shot, from any distance within a basketball court. It is not plausible to me that someone who dedicated their lives to it can ever miss.

Not common, just possible with millions of hours of practice. After ten years, and your brain has be completely rewired to be basket ball dominating machine, being so inc

In the case of basketball, bear in mind that aside from free throws, every player who has devoted their life to learning to shoot baskets has a guy in their face who's devoted their life to (among other things) stopping you from making that basket.

Er, no. People get tired, injured, distracted or just have an off day.

The human brain and general neuro-muscular parts have limits.

Someone who dedicates their life to something should be incredibly good at something.

Yes, but that's not the same as being perfect.

As another example, I have no idea how professional basketball players can ever miss a shot, from any distance within a basketball court. It is not plausible to me that someone who dedicated their lives to it can ever

You don't have to be able to throw or jump in hockey except *after* you score a goal, or your team has won the game.

More seriously, skating does not consume anywhere nearly as much energy per unit of time as running at the equivalent speeds... and since you did say it was only "arguably" more athletic, I figured that meant it would be okay to argue with you.

Cost of entry. Even as a white dude with a decent income, hockey is one of the few things that is off the table for my kids, because it's just too expensive. The amount of training that people put their kids through in Hockey in unlike any sport out there. You won't see kids who only ever played on an outdoor rink making it into the professional leagues. 20 years ago, that might have happened. But parents now spend thousands of dollars per year putting their kids in training camps, travelling leagues, and all other sorts of expensive endeavors, making the sport completely inaccessible to low income families, and even middle income families who don't want to devote all their resources to the sport.

And the NHL, arguably more athletic and dangerous than the NBA or NFL, is 95+% white dudes. Explain that one!

Everyone knows that hockey is the national past time in Canada, as such we get a controlling stake in the say of who gets to play. No one, not even Americans can tell us otherwise. Now that I've let the secret out though, we can't have you spreading it around...

She can dress how she wants. make herself up to look female, I don't care. But that person doesn't know what it's like to 'feel female' anymore then I know what it feels to be anther man. It's stupid. No one know what it feels like to be someone else much less a different gender.It's insulting to women, and it dismisses what could be actual mental issues.

If you are talking about Scarlett, she doesn't count, because we don't have a very complete grasp of the underlying reasons for the gender gap. Therefore, we must allow for the possibility that genetics plays a role. She may be socially female, but biologically male. God, I'm going to get a lot of flak for this one.